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Well, one's definition of "superior features" is bound to vary. I wouldn't expect an R600-burner out of Intel anytime Real Soon. OTOH, Intel generally doesn't aim for a pile if it doesn't think it can hit the top, so Nvidia and AMD have rights to be nervous.

I'm currently running a PowerColor x700 card with the Open Source driver under FC-6. Works fine.

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Well, one's definition of "superior features" is bound to vary. I wouldn't expect an R600-burner out of Intel anytime Real Soon. OTOH, Intel generally doesn't aim for a pile if it doesn't think it can hit the top, so Nvidia and AMD have rights to be nervous.

I'm currently running a PowerColor x700 card with the Open Source driver under FC-6. Works fine.

I don't expect an R600 burner (Or a GeForce8 burner for that matter... ) but I'd expect an R400 (NVidia GeForce5/6) burner, possibly an R500 (GeForce 7) harrier out of a dedicated X3000- the most critical thing is that it performs respectively well and that it's got open info and open sourced drivers. I expect this to happen because UMA does nothing but drag a GPU to it's worst case performance levels.

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Intel are doing some things right, however. I know clock speed doesn't matter so much, but even if Intel's designs are not quite as specialized or optimized as Nvidia's or ATI's hopefully they can make up for it by simply cranking up the mhz.

Also they mention 'many-core' quite a bit, don't they?

What would be the effect of dropping something like 3 GMA X3000-style cores, clocked at 800mhz-1ghz on a discrete card with 256 megs of DDR4 RAM and the ability to grab additional RAM over the PCIe port? (all on the same die, probably. How much silicon does a GMA core take up vs a previous generation pentiums that were made in those now-idle Intel fab plants?)

You'd end up with something like 24 programmable pipelines... It would be a very flexible card for a wide veriaty of situations wouldn't it? And I know that companies like multicore designs sometimes since power management is effective; you just shutoff cores you don't need, but you can fire them up on demand.

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Intel's Visual Computing Group (VCG) gave an interesting overview of the discrete graphics plans this week. There seems to be a few interesting developments down the pipeline that could prove quite a challenge to NVIDIA and AMD in 2 years time. As already stated on their website, the group is focused on developing advanced products based on a many-core architecture targeting high-end client platforms initially. Their first flagship product for games and graphics intensive applications is likely to happen in late 2008-09 timeframe and the GPU is based on multi-core architecture. We heard there could be as many as 16 graphics cores packed into a single die.

The process technology we speculate for such product is probably at 32nm judging from the timeframe. Intel clearly has the advantage of their advanced process technology since they are always at least one node ahead of their competitors and they are good in tweaking for better yield. Intel is likely use back their CPU naming convention on GPU so you could probably guess that the highest end could be called Extreme Edition and there should be mainstream and value editions. The performance? How about 16x performance of any fastest graphics card